Betty Edwards – The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain

Автор: Betty Edwards
Название книги: The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain
Формат: PDF
Жанр: Живопись и Графический дизайн
Качество: Изначально компьютерное, E-book

Twenty years have passed since the first publication of Drawing on
the Right Side of the Brain in July 1979. Ten years ago, in 1989,
I revised the book and published a second edition, bringing it up
to date with what I had learned during that decade. Now, in 1999,
I am revising the book one more time. This latest revision represents
a culmination of my lifelong engrossment in drawing as a
quintessentially human activity.
How I came to write this book
Over the years, many people have asked me how I came to write
this book. As often happens, it was the result of numerous chance
events and seemingly random choices. First, my training and
background were in fine arts—drawing and painting, not in art
education. This point is important, I think, because I came to
teaching with a different set of expectations.
After a modest try at living the artist's life, I began giving private
lessons in painting and drawing in my studio to help pay the
bills. Then, needing a steadier source of income, I returned to
UCLA to earn a teaching credential. On completion, I began
teaching at Venice High School in Los Angeles. It was a marvelous
job. We had a small art department of five teachers and
lively, bright, challenging, and difficult students. Art was their
favorite subject, it seemed, and our students often swept up many
awards in the then-popular citywide art contests
Those five years at Venice High started my puzzlement about
drawing. As the newest teacher of the group, I was assigned the
job of bringing the students up to speed in drawing. Unlike many
art educators who believe that ability to draw well is dependent
on inborn talent, I expected that all of the students would learn to
draw. I was astonished by how difficult they found drawing, no
matter how hard I tried to teach them and they tried to learn.
I would often ask myself, “Why is it that these students, who
I know are learning other skills, have so much trouble learning to
draw something that is right in front of their eyes?” I would sometimes
quiz them, asking a student who was having difficulty drawing
a still-life setup, “Can you see in the still-life here on the table
that the orange is in front of the vase?” “Yes,” replied the student,
“I see that.” “Well,” I said, “in your drawing, you have the orange
and the vase occupying the same space.” The student answered,
“Yes, I know. I didn't know how to draw that.” “Well,” I would say
carefully, “you look at the still-life and you draw it as you see it.”
“I was looking at it,” the student replied. “I just didn't know how
to draw that.” “Well,” I would say, voice rising, “you just look at
it…” The response would come, “I am looking at it,” and so on.
Another puzzlement was that students often seemed to “get”
how to draw suddenly rather than acquiring skills gradually.
Again, I questioned them: “How come you can draw this week
when you couldn't draw last week?” Often the reply would be, “I
don't know. I'm just seeing things differently.” “In what way differently?”
I would ask. “I can't say—just differently.” I would pursue
the point, urging students to put it into words, without success.
Usually students ended by saying, “I just can't describe it.”
One day, on impulse, I asked the students to copy a Picasso
drawing upside down. That small experiment, more than anything
else I had tried, showed that something very different is
going on during the act of drawing. To my surprise, and to the
students' surprise, the finished drawings were so extremely well
done that I asked the class, “How come you can draw upside
down when you can't draw right-side up?” The students
responded, “Upside down, we didn't know what we were drawing.”
This was the greatest puzzlement of all and left me simply
baffled.
During the following year, 1968, first reports of psychobiologist
Roger W. Sperry's research on human brain-hemisphere
functions, for which he later received a Nobel Prize, appeared in
the press. Reading Sperry's work caused in me something of an
Ah-ha! experience. His stunning finding, that the human brain
uses two fundamentally different modes of thinking, one verbal,
analytic, and sequential and one visual, perceptual, and simultaneous,
seemed to cast light on my questions about drawing. The
idea that one is shifting to a different-from-usual way of thinking/
seeing fitted my own experience of drawing and illuminated
my observation of my students.
Avidly, I read everything I could find about Sperry's work and
did my best to explain to my students its possible relationship to
drawing. They too became interested in the problems of drawing
and soon they were achieving great advances in their drawing
skills.